The Greatest Human Being That Has Ever Lived!

Alexander Von Humboldt - Most latin american countries made him an honorary citizen, Cuba and Mexico were first. What Humboldt, Germany, and the German people have done will serve the entire
planet for the next 10,000 years. Go to wikipedia free encyclopedia and learn about The Grimm Brothers, Brothers Grimm, Snow white, Sleeping beauty, Cinderella, The Frog Prince, Hansel and
Gretal, ETC.

The German people as a nationality have done more then any other people on this planet. There are 65 million Germans in America. Why do we keep saying that they're bad? Barbarians!﻿

These Singspiele were comedies mixing spoken dialogue and singing, influenced by the similar genres of the ballad opera in England and the opéra comique in France. Often having sentimental plots and extremely simple music, Singspiele were no match for contemporary opera serias in artistic
sophistication. Yet at the end of the 18th century a composer who would change all this would emerge: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.[6]﻿

The Baroque era

The world's first opera was Dafne by Jacopo Peri, which appeared in Florence in 1598. Three decades later Heinrich Schütz set the same libretto in a translation by the poet Martin Opitz, thus creating the first ever German-language opera. The music to Schütz's Dafne is now lost
and details of the performance are sketchy, but it is known to have been written to celebrate the marriage of Landgrave Georg II of Hessen-Darmstadt to Princess Sophia Eleonora of Saxony in Torgau in 1627. As in Italy, the first patrons of opera in Germany and Austria were royalty and the nobility, and they tended to
favour composers and singers from south of the Alps. Antonio Cesti was particularly successful, providing the huge operatic extravaganza Il pomo d'oro for the imperial court in Vienna in 1668. Opera in Italian would continue to exercise a considerable sway over German-speaking lands throughout the Baroque
and Classical periods. Nevertheless, native forms were developing too. In Nuremberg in 1644, Sigmund Staden produced the "spiritual pastorale", Seelewig, which foreshadows the Singspiel, a genre of German-language opera in which arias alternate with spoken dialogue. Seelewig was a
moral allegory inspired by the example of contemporary school dramas and is the first German opera whose music has survived.[1]

Another important development was the founding of the Theater am Gänsemarkt
in Hamburg in 1678, aimed at the local middle classes who preferred opera in their own language. The new opera house opened with a
performance of Johann Theile's Der erschaffene, gefallene und aufgerichtete Mensch, based on the story of Adam and Eve. The theatre, however, would come to be dominated by the works of Reinhard Keiser, an enormously prolific composer who wrote over a hundred operas, sixty of them for Hamburg. Initially,
the works performed in Hamburg had all been on religious themes in an attempt to ward off criticisms by Pietist church authorities that the theatre was immoral, but Keiser and fellow composers such as Johann Mattheson broadened the range of subject matter to include the historical and the mythological. Keiser
drew on foreign operatic traditions, for instance he included dances after the model of the French tradition of Lully. The recitative in his operas was always in German so the audience could follow the plot, but from Claudius in
1703 he began to include arias in Italian which allowed for florid vocal display. The hallmark of the Hamburg style was its eclecticism. Orpheus (1726) by Telemann[2] contains arias in Italian setting texts taken from famous Handel operas as well as choruses in French to words originally set by Lully. Hamburg opera might also include comic characters
(Keiser's Der Carneval von Venedig of 1707 has them speaking in the local Lower Saxon dialect), marking a great contrast to the elevated new style of opera seria as defined by Metastasio. Yet the immediate future belonged to Italian opera. The most famous German-born opera composer of the
era, Handel, wrote four operas for Hamburg at the beginning of his career but soon moved on to write opera seria in Italy and England.[3] In 1738, the Theater am Gänsemarkt went bankrupt and the fortunes of serious opera in German
went into decline for the next few decades.[4]

The other leading German composers of the time tended to follow Handel's example. This was
because the courts of the various German states favoured opera in Italian. In 1730 the chief proponent of opera seria, the Italian librettist Metastasio, took up residence as the imperial poet in Vienna. Johann Adolf Hasse wrote operas in Italian for the court of the Elector of Saxony inDresden. Hasse also wrote operas for the court of Frederick the Great in Berlin, as did Carl Heinrich Graun. The king himself supplied the libretto for Graun's Montezuma, first performed in 1755.

Deprived of aristocratic patronage, opera in German was forced to look to the general
public to survive. This meant theatrical companies had to tour from town to town. The Singspiel became the most popular form of German opera, especially in the hands of the composer Johann Adam Hiller. Hiller's 1766 reworking of the Singspiel Die verwandelten Weiber was a
landmark in the history of the genre, although his most famous work would be Die Jagd (1770).Abel Seyler, the Swiss-born director of the Seyler theatrical company, was noted as a proponent of German opera, commissioning operas by
Hiller, Georg Anton Benda, Anton Schweitzer and other composers.[5]

The Classical era

As music moved into the Classical era in the late 18th century, most German-born composers
still avoided writing opera in their own language. The great figure of the early Classical period was Christoph Willibald von Gluck but his pioneering reforms were directed at Italian and
French opera, not the German repertoire. In 1778, Emperor Joseph II attempted to change this state of affairs by establishing a German-language opera troupe,
the National Singspiel, at the Burgtheater in Vienna. The experiment was short-lived and the troupe was dissolved in 1783, yet the previous year it had
produced one undoubted success withDie Entführung aus dem Serail by the young Mozart. Goethe immediately recognised the quality of the piece, declaring "it knocked us all sideways". In the following years commercial
theatres sprang up in Vienna offering German-language opera. The impresarioEmanuel Schikaneder had particular success with his Theater auf der Wieden on the outskirts of the city. In 1791, he persuaded Mozart to set one of his
libretti, The Magic Flute. This proved to be no ordinary Singspiel. Though the traditional farcical elements
remained, Mozart added a new seriousness, particularly in the music for Sarastro and his priests. Even more than Die Entführung, theMagic Flute pointed the way forward for
future German opera.[7]

The greatest German composer of the next generation, Beethoven, seized on The Magic Flute's blend of domestic comedy and high seriousness for his only opera,Fidelio, the story of a devoted wife who saves her husband from political imprisonment. The years following the French Revolution of 1789 had been some of the most turbulent in European history. In Fidelio,
Beethoven wanted to express the ideals of that Revolution: liberty, equality and fraternity. He was also inspired by contemporary French works, particularly the "rescue operas" of Luigi Cherubini. Beethoven was arguably not a natural composer of opera and, althoughFidelio was
premiered in 1805, it was not until 1814 that he produced its final version. Nevertheless, Fidelio is widely regarded as a masterpiece and is one of the key works in the German repertoire.[8]

In the early years of the nineteenth century, the vast cultural movement known
as Romanticism began to exert an influence over German composers. The Romantics showed a keen interest in the Middle Ages as well as German folklore. The fairy tale collections of the Brothers Grimm and the rediscovered Medieval German epic the Nibelungenlied were major sources of inspiration for the movement. There was also often a quest for a
distinctively German identity, influenced by the new nationalism which had arisen in the wake of the Napoleonic invasions. Romanticism was already firmly established in German literature with writers such as Tieck, Novalis, Eichendorff and Clemens Brentano. One of the most famous German Romantic authors,E.T.A. Hoffmann, was also a music theorist and a composer in his own right and in 1816 he produced an
opera, Undine, in Berlin. Another important early Romantic opera was Faust by Louis Spohr (also 1816). Both Hoffmann and Spohr took the basic form of the Singspiel as their starting
point but began to group the individual numbers into extended scenes. They also employed "reminiscence motifs", recurring musical themes associated with characters or concepts in the opera, which
would pave the way for Wagner's use of the leitmotif.[9]

The major breakthrough in the history of German Romantic opera was Der Freischütz by Carl Maria von Weber, premiered in Berlin on 18 June 1821. Weber resented the Europe-wide dominance of the
Italian operas of Rossini and wanted to establish a uniquely German style of opera. He turned to German folk songs and folklore for
inspiration; Der Freischütz is based on a tale from the Gespensterbuch("Book of Wraiths") of Apel and Laun concerning a marksman who makes a pact with the Devil.
Weber's strong point was his striking ability to evoke atmosphere through orchestral colour. From the very first bars of the overture, it is obvious we are in the primeval forests of Germany. The
highlight of the opera is the chilling Wolf's Glen Scene in which the hero Max makes his deal with the Devil.Der Freischütz was immensely popular, not only in Germany, but throughout
Europe. Weber never really achieved his full potential as an opera composer due to his early death from tuberculosis and his poor choice of libretti. His major German opera after Der
Freischütz, Euryanthe (1823), suffers from a particularly weak text and is rarely staged nowadays.
Yet Euryanthe marks another important stage in the development of serious German opera. Weber completely eliminated spoken dialogue, producing a "through-composed" work where the
distinction between recitative and aria is becoming blurred. Its lessons would not be lost on future composers, most notably Richard Wagner.[10]

Mention should be made of two great composers of the era who wrote their major works in
other genres yet also composed operas: Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann. Schubert wrote over a dozen operas, mostly in the Singspiel style. Hardly any were
performed during the composer's lifetime. Schumann only wrote one opera, Genoveva, first staged in Leipzig in 1850. Though praised by Liszt, it failed to win lasting success. The verdict on both these composer's operas has generally been that, though they contain excellent
music, they have too many dramatic weaknesses to be acclaimed as great stage works.[11]

Richard Wagner was one of the most revolutionary and controversial composers in musical history and his innovations
changed the course of opera, not just in Germany and Austria but throughout Europe. Wagner gradually evolved a new concept of opera as a Gesamtkunstwerk (a "complete work of art"),
a fusion of music, poetry and painting. His earliest experiments followed the examples set by Weber (Die Feen) and Meyerbeer (Rienzi), but his most important formative influence was probably the symphonic music of Beethoven. Wagner believed his career truly began with Der fliegende Holländer (1843). Together with the two works which
followed, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, this has been described as the "zenith of German Romantic opera".[12] Yet these were merely a prelude to even more radical developments. In his mature
dramas, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Der Ring des Nibelungen and Parsifal, Wagner abolished the distinction between aria and recitative in favour of a seamless flow of "endless melody". He
greatly increased the role and power of the orchestra, creating scores with a complex web of leitmotifs; and he was prepared to violate accepted musical conventions, such as tonality, in his quest for greater expressivity. Wagner also brought a new philosophical dimension to opera in his works, which were
usually based on stories from Germanic or Arthurian legend. Finally, Wagner built his own opera house at Bayreuth, exclusively dedicated to performing his own works in the style he wanted.[13]

Wagner's innovations cast an immense shadow over subsequent composers, who struggled to
absorb his influence while retaining their own individuality. One of the most successful composers of the following generation was Engelbert Humperdinck, whose Hänsel und Gretel (1893) still has an assured place in the standard repertoire.
Humperdinck turned back to folk song and the tales of the Brothers Grimm for inspiration. Yet, though Hänsel is often viewed as the ideal piece for
introducing opera to children, it also has extraordinarily sophisticated orchestration and makes great use of leitmotifs, both tell-tale signs of Wagner's influence.

Richard Strauss was heavily influenced by Wagner, despite his father's efforts to the contrary. By seventeen, he
was unimpressed with Tannhäuser, Lohengrinand Siegfried but absolutely entranced by the other three pieces of the Ring and Tristan und Isolde. Although in his early years he was more famous for his orchestral tone
poems, Salome (1905) and Elektra (1907) quickly established his reputation as Germany's leading opera composer. These two operas
stretched the tonal music system to its breaking point. The highly chromatic music featured harsh dissonances and unresolved harmonies. This, paired with the gruesome subject matter, looked forward
to expressionism. Elektra also marked the beginning of Strauss's working relationship with the leading
Austrian poet and playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who would provide another five libretti for the composer. With Der Rosenkavalier of 1910, Strauss changed direction, looking towards Mozart and the world of the Viennese waltz as much as towards Wagner. Modernist critics accused him of "selling out", but Rosenkavalierproved an immense
success with audiences around the world. Strauss continued to ignore critical fashion, producing the mixture of farce and high tragedy ofAriadne auf Naxos, the complex allegory of Die Frau ohne Schatten, the domestic dramas of Intermezzo and Arabella, and the mythological Die ägyptische Helena and Daphne. Strauss bid farewell to the musical stage with Capriccio of 1942, a "conversation piece" which explores the relationship between words and music in
opera.[15]

In the late nineteenth century, a new, lighter form of opera, operetta, became popular in Vienna. Operettas had immediately attractive tunes, comic (and often frivolous) plots and used spoken dialogue between the musical
"numbers". Viennese operetta was inspired by the fashion for the French operettas of Jacques Offenbach. Der Pensionat (1860) by Franz von Suppé is generally regarded as the first important operetta in the German language, but by far the
most famous example of the genre is Die Fledermaus (1874) by Johann Strauss. Franz Lehár's The Merry Widow (1905) was another massive hit. Other composers who worked in this style
include Oscar Straus and Sigmund Romberg.[17]

Following the example of Wagner, Richard Strauss, Zemlinsky and Schreker had pushed
traditional tonality to the absolute limits. Now a new group of composers appeared in Vienna who wanted to take music beyond. Operatic modernism truly began in the operas of two composers of the so-called Second Viennese School, Arnold Schoenberg and his acolyte Alban Berg, both advocates of atonality and its later development (as worked out by Schoenberg), dodecaphony. Schoenberg's early musico-dramatic works, Erwartung (1909, premiered in 1924) and Die glückliche Hand display heavy use of chromatic harmony and dissonance in general. Schoenberg
also occasionally used Sprechstimme, which he described as: "The voice rising and falling relative to the indicated intervals, and everything being
bound together with the time and rhythm of the music except where a pause is indicated". Schoenberg intended Moses und Aron as his operatic masterpiece, but it was left unfinished at his death.

The two operas of Schoenberg's pupil Alban Berg, Wozzeck and Lulu (left incomplete at his death) share many of the same characteristics described above, though Berg combined
his highly personal interpretation of Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique with melodic passages of a more traditionally tonal nature (quite Mahlerian in character). This perhaps partially explains why his operas have remained in standard repertory, despite their
controversial music and plots.

[edit]1918–1945: Weimar Germany, Inter-war Austria and the Third Reich

The years following World War I saw German and Austrian culture flourishing in spite of
the surrounding political turmoil. Late Romantic composers were still at work alongside the avowed modernists Schoenberg and Berg. The Italian-born Ferruccio Busoni ploughed an individual furrow, attempting to fuse Bach and the avant-garde, Mediterranean and Germanic culture in his music. He never lived to finish his most significant
opera Doktor Faust (1925). Paul Hindemith began his operatic career with short, scandalous pieces such as Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen("Murder, Hope of Women") before turning to Bach, as
Busoni had done. Hindemith saw Bach-inspired "neo-classicism" as a way of curbing the excesses of late Romanticism. Cardillac(1925) was his first work in this vein. Hindemith was also interested in putting contemporary life on the stage in
his operas (a concept called Zeitoper), as was Ernst Krenek whose Jonny spielt auf (1927) has a jazz violinist as its hero. Kurt Weill reflected life in Weimar Germany in a more overtly political way. His most famous collaboration with Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera (1928), was both a scandal and an immense box-office success.

Adolf Hitler's assumption of power destroyed this thriving operatic scene. Ironically, after the burning of the Reichstag in 1933, the German seat of the government was moved to theKrolloper, the state opera house in Berlin which, under the adventurous directorship of Otto Klemperer, had seen the premieres of many innovative works of the 1920s, including Hindemith'sNeues vom Tage. Now Hindemith responded to the advent of the Third Reich with his chief work Mathis der Maler, a portrait of an artist trying to survive in hostile times. It received its premiere
in Zürich in 1938, since all performances of Hindemith's music had been banned in Germany the previous year. In 1940, Hindemith
left Switzerland for the United States, joining a transatlantic exodus of composers which included Schoenberg, Weill, Korngold and Zemlinsky. Schreker had died in 1934, having been dismissed from his
teaching post by the Nazis; other composers, such as the promising Viktor Ullmann, would perish in the death camps. Some opera composers, including Carl Orff, Werner Egk and the ageing Richard Strauss, remained in Germany to accommodate with the new regime as best they could.

Manfred von Ardenne: Self-taught researcher, applied physicist and inventor. Inventor of television among other
things. 600 patents in fields including electron microscopy, medical technology, nuclear technology, plasma physics, and radio and television technology.

Hermann Bahlsen: The butter cookie was invented over
100 years ago by Hermann Bahlsen. Since then, the company has been one of the leading trendsetters in the industry for factory-produced sweet cakes and cookies as well as new technologies.[a]

Hans Bethe: Nuclear physicist and Nobel laureate in physics 1967. During World War II, he was head of the Theoretical Division at
the secretLos Alamos laboratory which developed the first atomic bombs.

Emil Adolf von Behring: Discovered the diphtheria antitoxin. It was the world's first cure for a disease
(1891).[3] He was awarded history's first Nobel Prize in Physiology of
Medicine in 1901.

Max Born: Physicist and mathematician. Groundbreaking work in quantum mechanics. Nobel laureate 1954 with Walther Bothe. His Ph.D.
student Delbrück, and six of his assistants (Fermi, Heisenberg, Goeppert-Mayer, Herzberg, Pauli, Wigner) went on to win Nobel Prizes. His Ph.D. student J. Robert Oppenheimer led the project to develop the atomic bomb.

Manfred Börner: Physicist. Developed the first
working fiber-optical data transmission system in 1965. Received a patent for an "electro-optical transmission system
utilizing lasers".

Manfred Curry: German American yachtsman, developed the cam cleat used on sailboats to easily and quickly secure a rope, discoverer of the pseudoscientific phenomenon
of "geomagnetic lines" called the Curry Grid.

Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch: Invented a process in 1925 to turn coal into synthesis gas, and still further into liquid hydrocarbons. The
process is a key component in modern gas to liquids processes.

Irmgard Flügge-Lotz: She worked on what she called "discontinuous automatic control," which laid the
foundation for automatic on-off aircraft control systems in jets.

Werner Forssmann: Performed the first human cardiac catheterisation. Shared the Nobel Price for Medicine 1956

Joseph von Fraunhofer: Discovery of the dark absorption lines known as Fraunhofer lines in the Sun's
spectrum, and for making excellent optical glass and achromatic telescope objectives.

Otto Frenzl: Aeronautical pioneer, developed
the area rule in 1943, a design technique for airfoils used to reduce an aircraft's drag at transonic and supersonic speeds. Later
it was independently developed again by Richard T. Whitcomb in 1952.

Hermann Ganswindt: Inventor and spaceflight scientist, whose inventions (such as the dirigible, the helicopter, and
the internal combustion engine) are thought to have been ahead of his time.

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss: German mathematician and physical scientist who contributed
significantly to many fields, including number theory, statistics, analysis, differential geometry, geodesy, geophysics, electrostatics, astronomy and optics. Sometimes referred to as "the Prince of
Mathematicians".

Heinz Guderian: The father of modern mechanized warfare, inventor of the Blitzkrieg strategy.

Otto von Guericke: Groundbreaking research into air pressure. Invented the vacuum pump in 1650.

Johannes Gutenberg: Inventor of the technology of printing with movable type in 1439. The first book so printed
was the Gutenberg Bible, one of the most beautifully executed printed books ever produced.

Otto Hahn: German chemist and Nobel laureate who pioneered the fields of radioactivity and radiochemistry. Considered to be "the
father of nuclear chemistry" and the "founder of the atomic age". Discovered many isotopes, Protactinium and nuclear fission.

Harald zur Hausen: Virologist, discovered the role of papilloma viruses in the development of cervical cancer. His research made the development of a vaccine against papilloma possible, which will drastically
reduce cervical cancer in future. Nobel laureate 2008.

Werner Heisenberg: Theoretical physicist who made fundamental contributions to quantum mechanics. Discovered a
particle's position and velocity cannot be known at the same time. Discovered atomic nuclei are made of protons and neutrons.

Robert Koch: Physician, discoverer, inventor and Nobel Prize winner. He became famous for isolating Bacillus anthracis (1877),
the Tuberculosis bacillus (1882) and the Vibrio cholera (1883) and for his development of Koch's postulates.

Arthur Korn: Inventor involved in development of the fax machine, specifically the transmission of photographs or
telephotography, known as theBildtelegraph.

Max Kramer: Aircraft engineer. Developed the first operational guided bomb in 1942/43. This first smart bomb was radio controlled and joy-stick operated.

Julius H. Kroehl: Inventor and engineer, who built the first functioning submarine in the world.

Herbert Kroemer: Physicist, shared the Nobel Prize in Physics 2000 for developing semiconductor heterostructures used
in high-speed- and opto-electronics.

Karl Marx: Political economist and philosopher, who defined the political/economical background of capitalism and discovered the
mechanics ofMarxism. His ideas still influence the world we now live in.

Wilhelm Maybach: Together with Gottlieb Daimler the first gasoline-powered motorcycle, power-engined boat and later,
1902, the Mercedes car model.

Julius Lothar Meyer: With Mendeleev he developed the periodic classification of the elements in order of their
atomic weight.

Gregor Mendel: Discoveries in genetics. Mendel demonstrated that the inheritance of certain traits in pea plants follows
particular patterns, now referred to as the laws of Mendelian inheritance. First published in 1865.

Ottmar Mergenthaler: Inventor who has been called a second Gutenberg because of his invention of the Linotype
machine.

Fritz Reiche: was a student of Max Planck and a colleague of Albert Einstein,who was active in, and made important
contributions to the early development of quantum mechanics including co-authoring the Thomas-Reiche-Kuhn sum rule

Bernhard Riemann: Mathematician, who made lasting contributions to analysis, number theory, and differential
geometry.

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen: Physicist and discoverer of x-rays/Röntgen rays (8 November 1895), this
earned him the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901.

Georg Wilhelm Steller: Chief naturalist on Vitus Bering's expedition during which Alaska was discovered
(1741) and pioneer of Alaskan Natural History. Steller's sea cow (now extinct) was named after him.

Dietrich "Diedrich" Uhlhorn: Engineer, mechanic and
inventor, who invented the first mechanical tachometer (1817), between 1817 and 1830 inventor of the Presse Monétaire (level coin press known as Uhlhorn Press) which bears his name.

Rudolf Virchow: "Father of modern pathology"; numerous discoveries in the area of medicine.

Hans Vogt: Invented sound-on-film (idea 1905) together with Jo Engl and Joseph Massolle, first sound-on-film for the public on 17
September 1922 in Filmtheater Alhambra, Berlin, Germany.

Woldemar Voigt (often: Waldemar Voigt): Physicist, who taught at the Georg August University of Göttingen. He worked
on crystal physics, thermodynamics and electro-optics. He discovered the Voigt effect in 1898.

^The Bahlsen cookie tradition was started by Hermann
Bahlsen (1859-1919) in 1888. Bahlsen, originally from Hannover, worked as a sugar merchant in Great Britain, where he learned about the English cakes. In 1889 he founded the Hannoversche Cakesfabrik
in Hannover. He broke away from his competitors by selling cookies in packages rather than individually. In 1891he developed what was to become Germany's most well-known brand-name cookie: the
Leibnitz-Cakes - a butter cookie named after the Philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz from the city of Leipzig. Bahlsen was a pioneer in both marketing and production. He used innovative
advertising techniques: in 1898 he installed an illuminated poster (the second one in Germany) at the Postdamer Platz in Berlin showing the Leibnitz-Cakes as an ideal travel snack. Likewise, Bahlsen
was the first in Europe to implement an assembly-line. Bahlsen also had an impact on the German language. In 1911 he created the word "Keks" as a translation for the English word "Cakes." He used
this new word in his business name, changing it to H. Bahlsens Keks-Fabrik Hannover. At the same time, he changed the name of his butter cookie to Leibnitz-Keks. The word Keks (plural: Kekse) was
added to the German dictionaries the same year.

^Albrecht Ludwig Berblinger (1770-1829), known as the
"Flying Tailor of Ulm", started with flight experiments in Ulm, Germany, in the early 19th century. He gained experience in downhill gliding with a maneuverable airworthy semi-rigid hang-glider and
then attempted to cross the Danube River at Ulm's Eagle's Bastion on the 31st of May 1811. The tricky local winds caused him to crash and he was rescued by fishermen, making him the first survivor of
a water immersion accident of a heavier-than-air manned "flight machine". Though he failed in his attempt to be the first man to fly, Berblinger can be regarded as one of the significant aviation
pioneers who applied the "heavier than air" principle and paved the way for the more effective glide-flights of Otto Lilienthal (1891) and the Wright Brothers (1902). Less known are Berblinger's
significant contributions to the construction of artificial limbs for medical use, as well as the spring-application in aviation. His invention of a special mechanical joint was also used for the
juncture of the wings of his "flying machine". Because of his worthwhile contributions to medicine and flight, in 1993 the German Academy of Aviation Medicine named an annual award for young
scientists in the field of aerospace medicine in his honor.

Loewenfeld was the founder of Chiltern Herb Farms in England,[6] one of the earliest producers of high-quality dried herbs, and was one of the first
members of the Soil Association.[7] She wrote a number of books about nutrition, including Britain's Wild Larder:
Fungi (1956), Herb Gardening(1967) and Everything you should know about your food (1978).

Contents

Claire was born in Belin, Germany. Her parents were Arthur and Jeanette (née Jacobi)
Lewisohn. She married Günther Emmanuel Loewenfeld (November 1895–January 1984) on 5 July 1921. They continued to live in Berlin in the period followng their marriage.[8] Both Claire and Günther were from Jewish families, however, Günther was brought up in the Protestant faith.[9] Between 1923 and 1925 they spent their weekends with friends Fritz and Lily Pincus
in a rented house, in Glienicke, on the outskirts of Potsdam. In 1925 the Loewenfelds and Pincuses moved out of Berlin to adjacent rented properties which they shared on the Küssel, a peninsula jutting out into Lake Templiner in a rural district of Potsdam. Both husbands commuted to Berlin to work. By 1931 Claire and Günther
had two children, Peter and Verena, likewise the Pincuses had two children. Both couples also had their relatives living with them from time to time and as more living space was needed they decided
to buy their respective properties enlarging and linking them. Das Haus auf dem Küssel (The House on the Küssel) as it had become known was redesigned, to include both shared areas
and private quarters, by a well-known Potsdam architect, Stephan Hirtzel.[10] Another close friend of both families, Paul Tillich, a German-American Protestant theologian wrote a dedication on the inauguration of their new home entitled, (in English), Space and Time in
Dwelling.[9][11] The Loewenfeld and Pincuses' house soon became a meeting place for Tillich and his
circle of German intellectuals until Tillich, whose writings brought him into conflict with the Nazi movement, was subsequently forced into exile in the U.S.[12][13]

"While in Palestine, Claire and Guenther were in constant danger of their lives. Once, the
only thing that saved them was their Arab guide saying they were German Nazis. Hitler is the big man with the Arabs. Mussolini gives them money to spite the British." [13]

From 1937 Claire and Lily's home in the Küssel provided a refuge for Jewish children,
whose parents had been arrested or had been abandoned and were homeless.[10] Claire's family continued to live in Germany until the latter part of 1938
when they left Potsdam due to the increasing likelihood of arrest. The Loewenfelds had made arrangements in advance for their belongings to be transported to England and for their children to be
evacuated to an English boarding school, St Christopher School, Letchworth, Hertfordshire.[14] Meanwhile Günther joined relatives in England and Claire travelled first to
Switzerland before rejoining her husband in early 1939.[10] The family settled in rural Buckinghamshire in 1941.[15]

During her time in Berlin in the 1920s Claire worked at an institute "providing slides and
illustrations" for a university.[8] In late 1938 Claire Loewenfeld studied at the Maximilian Bircher-Benner's
clinic in Zurich, Switzerland obtaining a special diploma in nutrition.[10] During the Second World War, she worked at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London, England as a
dietician.[5] While there she specialised in the treatment of coeliac disease and successfully
developed a new diet to treat it, based on Bircher-Benner's recipes, involving raw vegetable and fruit juice; she was also involved in longitudinal comparative studies assessing various treatments
for the condition.[16]

During the war, Loewenfeld wrote to The Times and the British
Medical Journal about the negative impact the shortage of fresh fruit and vegetables was having on the nation's health, and advocated the collection and distribution of rose hips from the hedgerows, as they provided "our highest home-grown source of Vitamin C".[3][17] As a result a leaflet she had prepared called Wild Rose Hips in War Time.
Their Collection, Preparation and Use on how to exploit rose hips was immediately in huge demand.[18][19] Over 18000 leaflets were sent by Claire to individuals as well as being widely
distributed to schools and hospitals. In response, the government organised a nationwide initiative to collect roadside rose hips which, with the help of the Women's Institutes, were processed into syrup for babies and children. This was the first of several leaflets;
there were an additional three under the title Wild Plants and Herbs, and three more grouped together under the heading Wild Fruits and Berries which were also
distributed with the assistance of the newsagent WH Smith.[20]

After the war, Claire set up Chiltern Herb Farm in Buckland Common, Buckinghamshire, with her husband, who before the war had practiced as an attorney and later had become a landscape architect.[12] Her experience of using dried herbs to treat sick children during the war had
made her aware that the standard preparation techniques resulted in material of poor nutrional value. Experimentation led to methods for producing dried herbs of higher quality which coincided with
an increasing demand in Britain for such culinary products.[20] She also gave lectures and demonstrations,[21] and wrote and collaborated on several books about healthy eating, herb gardening, and
cooking with herbs and spices, some of which were also translated into German, Dutch and Spanish.[22] She was a vegetarian[5] and also promoted the benefits of Birchermüesli, or müesli as it is better known, which she learned the health benefits of while training at the
Bircher-Benner Clinic. She translated into English the book by Ruth Bircher which also contained the original recipe for the cereal food (Bircher 1961).
She was one of the first members of the Soil Association, advocating freshly prepared food and campaigning against the processing of food and addition of chemicals.[23] Claire was also a member of the women's volunteer organisation, Soroptimist International.[8]